The Judging Eye (12 page)

She found herself bending to
assist old Vem-Mithriti, the Grandmaster of the Imperial Saik, to his feet. He
smiled and murmured shamefaced thanks, more like a shrinking-voiced adolescent
than one of the most powerful Exalt-Ministers in the New Empire. Sometimes
Kellhus chose people for their wit and strength, as was the case with Phinersa,
and sometimes for their weakness. She often wondered whether old Vem was his
Gift to her, since Kellhus himself had no difficulty handling the wilful and
ambitious.

Maithanet, her brother-in-law
and the Shriah of the Thousand Temples, towered next to the two
Exalt-Ministers, dressed in a plain white tunic. The oiled plaits of his beard
gleamed like jet in the lantern light. His height and force of presence never
failed to remind Esmenet of her husband—the same light, only burning through
the sackcloth of a human mother.

"Thelli found it during a
surprise inspection of the new slaves," he said, his voice so deep and
resonant that it somehow blotted out the memory of the others. With a broad
gesture, he drew her eyes out over the balustrade to the iron apparatus several
lengths below...

Where it hung naked in a pose
reminiscent of the Circumfix: the skin-spy.

Slicked in perspiration, its
black limbs flexed against the iron brackets that clamped each of its
joints—wrists, elbows, shoulders, waist. Even so immobilized, it seemed to
seethe
somehow, as though reflexively testing various points of leverage. The
rusty grind and creak of the apparatus spoke to its ominous strength. Muscle
twined like braided snakes.

A single gold pin had been
driven into its skull, which, according to the arcane principles of
Neuropuncture, had forced the thing to unclench its face. Masticating limbs
waved where features should have been. They hooked the air like a dying crab,
some flanged with disconnected lips, others bearing a flaccid eyelid, a hanging
nostril, a furred swatch of brow. Perpetually shocked eyes glared from the
pulpy shadows between. Teeth glistened from bared gums.

Esmenet clenched her teeth
against the bile rising into her throat. Even after so many years, there was
something about the creatures, some violation of fundamentals, that struck her
to the visceral quick. As a reminder of the threat that loomed over her and her
family, she kept one of their skulls in her personal apartments. It had a great
hole where the eyes of a human would hang over the bridge of the nose. The rim
of the hole possessed sockets for each unnatural finger. And the fingers, which
some artisan had wired into a semblance of their natural pose, folded together
in elaborate counterpoise, some curved and interlocking across the forehead,
others bent into complex signs about the eyes, mouth, and nose. Every morning
she glanced at it—and found herself not so much afraid as
convinced
.

It had long since become an
argument for suffering her husband.

And now, here was another one,
wrapped in shining meat. One of the Consults most lethal weapons. A skin-spy. A
living justification. The threat that forgave her tyranny.

"Black-skinned?" she
said, turning to Maithanet. "Have we ever captured a Satyothi
before?"

"This is the first,"
the Holy Shriah replied, nodding toward Theliopa as he spoke. "We think it
might be a test of some kind."

"A plausible
assumption," Theliopa said, her voice high and cold. "If the
threshold of detection were a near thing, it might have been successful. For
all the Consult knows, the subtle differences between complexions and bone
structure could have rendered this one undetectable. It would explain the seven
hundred and thirty-three days that have elapsed since their last attempt to
infiltrate the court."

Esmenet nodded, too unnerved by
her daughter's vacant and all-seeing gaze to work through the implications.

She checked on the boys. On his
tiptoes, Kelmomas stared with something resembling rapt indecision, as if
trying to decide whether the thing below them was a match for his wilder
imaginings. Samarmas had abandoned Lord Sankas to join his twin at the balustrade.
He stared between his fingers, his face held partially averted. They seemed
wise and imbecilic versions of the same child, one modern, the other antique,
almost as though history had folded back on itself. Without warning, Kelmomas
turned to gaze into her face: In so many little ways, he was still his father's
son—and it worried her.

"What do you think?"
she asked with a forced smile.

"Scary."

"Yes. Scary."

As though sensing some kind of
permission in this, Samarmas threw his arms around her waist and began
blubbering. She held his cheek against her midriff and cooed to him in a soft,
shushing voice. When she looked up, Phinersa and Imhailas were watching her
intently. She supposed with Theliopa present she had no need to fear their
intent, but even still, there always seemed to be a glimpse of malice in their
look.

Or a lust that amounted to the
same.

"What do you wish, your
Glory?" Phinersa asked.

Without Kellhus, there was
nothing they could learn from this creature. Skin-spies possessed no souls,
nothing for Vem-Mithriti's sorcerous Cants to compel. And torments simply...
aroused them.

"Sound the Plate," she
said with weary decisiveness. "Let the People be reminded."

Maithanet nodded in sage assent.
"A most wise decision."

Everyone stared at the
monstrosity for a wordless moment, as if committing its form to memory. No
matter how many skin-spies she saw, they never ceased to unnerve her with their
devious impossibility.

Imhailas cleared his throat.
"Shall I make preparations for
your
attendance, your Glory?"

"Yes," she replied
absently. "Of course." The People needed to be reminded of more than
what threatened them, they needed to be reminded of the discipline that kept
them safe as well. They needed to recall the
disciplinarian
.

The tyrant.

She held Samarmas tight, pressed
her fingers through his hair, felt his scalp as soft and as warm as a cat
beneath her palm. Such a little soul. So defenceless. Her eyes strayed to
Kelmomas, who now crouched, his face pressed against the stone spindles, to
better study the gasping monstrosity below.

Though it pained her, she knew
her duty. She knew what
Kellhus
would say... By the mere fact of his
blood, they would live lives of mortal danger. For their own sakes, they would
need to become ruthless... as ruthless as she had failed to become.

"And for my children as
well."

***

"You're thinking about
yesterday's recital," the Holy Shriah of the Thousand Temples said.

After giving the twins back to
Porsi, Esmenet had joined her brother-in-law on the long walk to the palace's
postern entrance, where his bodyguard and carriage awaited. This had become
something of a tradition ever since Kellhus had left to lead the Great Ordeal
against Sakarpus. Not only did Maithanet's station make him her social and
political equal, his counsel had become a source of comfort—sustenance, even.
He was wise in a manner that, although never quite so penetrating as Kellhus,
always struck her as more... human.

And, of course, his blood made
him her closest ally.

"The way Nel-Saripal
begins," Esmenet replied, staring absently at the figures engraved in
marble panels along the walls. "Those first words... 'Momemn is the fist
in our breast, the beating heart..." She turned to look up at his stern
profile. "What do you think?"

"Significant,"
Maithanet conceded, "but only as a signal, the way birds tell sailors of
unseen land."

"Hmm. Yet another
unfriendly shore." She studied his expression, watched the smoke tailings
of an oil-lamp break about his hair and scalp. She had said this as a joke, but
her scrutiny made it seem more of a test.

Maithanet smiled and nodded.
"With my brother and his stalwarts gone, all the embers that we failed to
stamp out during the Unification will leap back into flame."

"What Nel-Saripal dares,
others will also?"

"There can be no
doubt."

She found herself frowning.
"So the Consult should no longer be our first priority? Is that what
you're saying?"

"No. Only that we need to
throw our nets wider. Think of the host my brother has assembled. The first
sons of a dozen nations. The greatest magi of all the Schools. Short of the
No-God's resurrection, nothing can save Golgotterath. The Consult's only hope is
to fan the embers, to throw the New Empire into turmoil, if not topple it
altogether. The Ainoni have a saying, 'When the hands are strong, attack the
feet.'"

"But who, Maitha? After so
much blood and fire, who could be so foolish as to raise arms against
Kellhus?"

"The well of fools has no
bottom, Esmi. You know that. You can assume that for every Fanayal who opposes
us openly, there are ten who skulk in the shadows."

"Just so long as they're
not so canny," she replied. "I'm not sure we could survive ten of
him
."

Twenty years ago, Fanayal had
ranked among the most cunning and committed foes of the First Holy War. Though
the heathen Empire of Kian had been the first to topple at the Aspect-Emperor's
feet, Fanayal had somehow managed to avoid his nation's fate. According to
Phinersa's briefings, songs of his exploits had reached as far as Galeoth. The
Judges had already burned a dozen or so travelling minstrels at the stake, but
the lays seemed to spread and reproduce with the stubbornness of a disease. The
"Bandit Padirajah," they were calling him. By simply drawing breath,
the man had immeasurably slowed the conversion of the old Fanim governorates.

The Shriah and the Empress
walked in silence for several moments. Their journey had taken them into the
Apparatory, where the residences of the palace's senior functionaries were
located. The girth of the halls had narrowed, and the mirror sheen of marble
had been replaced with planes of lesser stone. Many of the doors they passed
stood ajar, leaking the sounds of simpler, more tranquil existences. A nurse
singing to a babe. Mothers gossiping. Those few people they encountered in the
hall literally stood slack-jawed before throwing their faces to the ground. One
mother viciously yanked her son, an olive-skinned boy perhaps two or three
years younger than the twins, to the floor at her side. Esmenet heard his
crying more in her belly than in her ears, or so it seemed.

She clutched Maithanet's arm,
drew him to a halt.

"Esmi?"

"Tell me, Maitha," she
said hesitantly. "When"—she paused to bite her lip—"when you...
look... into my face, what do you see?"

A gentle smile creased his
plaited beard. "Not so far or so deep as my brother."

Dûnyain. It all came back to
this iron ingot of meaning. Maithanet, her children, everyone near to her
possessed some measure of Dûnyain blood. Everyone watched with a portion of her
husband's all-seeing eyes. For a heartbeat, she glimpsed Achamian as he had
stood twenty years earlier, a thousand smoke plumes scoring the sky beyond him.
"But you're not thinking! You see only your love for him. You're not
thinking of what he sees when he gazes upon you..."

And with a blink both he and his
heretical words were gone.

"That wasn't my
question," she said, recovering herself.

"Sorrow..." Maithanet
said, probing her face with warm, forgiving eyes. He lifted her small, slack
hands in the thick cage of his own. "I see sorrow and confusion. Worry for
your first, for Mimara. Shame... shame that you have come to fear your children
more than you fear
for
them. So very much happens, Esmi, both here and
in places remote... You fear you are not equal to the task my brother has set
for you."

"And the others?" she
heard herself ask. "Can the others see this as well?"

Dûnyain
, she thought.
Dûnyain
blood
.

The Shriah squeezed her hands in
reassurance. "Some sense it, perhaps, but only in a dim manner. They have
their prejudices, of course, but their sovereign and saviour has made
you
their
road to redemption. My brother has built a strong house for you to keep. I
hesitate to say as much, but you truly have no cause to fear, Esmi."

"Why?"

"For the same reason I have
no fear. The
Aspect-Emperor
has chosen you."

A Dûnyain. A Dûnyain has chosen
you.

"No. Why do you hesitate to
tell me?"

His eyes unfocused in
calculation, then returned to her. "Because if I see your fear, then
he
has seen it also. And if he has seen it, then he counts it as a
strength."

She tried in vain to blink away
the tears. His image sheered and blurred, Maithanet seemed an elusive,
predatory presence. A concatenation of liquid shadows. "You mean he's
chosen me
because
I'm weak?"

The Shriah of the Thousand
Temples shook his head in calm contradiction. "Is the man who flees to
fight anew weak? Fear is neither strong nor weak until events make it so."